by Tess Stimson
I startle. “Sorry?”
“Oh, Nicholas, don’t be mean, you know I saw you put it in your briefcase,” Mal teases, “and I just can’t wait any longer, I’m dying for my present, please can I have it now?”
This unedifying, shameful farce is clearly destined to play itself out to the bitter end. I reach beneath the table for my briefcase.
“I’m sorry. I—um—I didn’t get you a card.”
“Oh, Nicholas. As if that matters.”
She opens the bag and unwraps the underwear I selected for another woman. I feel sick with shame as she innocently holds the wisps of silk and lace up against herself. “Oh, how beautiful! Do you like them?”
“Of course,” I mutter. “I wouldn’t have bought them otherwise.”
“I can tell it’s been a while.” She laughs, examining the label. “These are two sizes too big; I’ll have to take them back and exchange them. You kept the receipt, didn’t you?” She peers back into the bag and gasps. “Oh, Nicholas. You didn’t—”
Please don’t notice that these match the bracelet Sara was wearing, please don’t put two and two together, please be your usual sweet, trusting, innocent self.
“Nicholas,” she breathes, gazing at the earrings. “They’re exquisite. I don’t know what to say.”
And suddenly, in a moment, the fog lifts. Non pote non sapere qui se stultum intellegit: A man must have some wit to know he is a fool.
I love Mal; I always have. From the moment I first met her, I’ve known she’s The One. She’s my dearest friend, my love, the mother of my children. There is a sweetness to her, a purity of heart and spirit, that I have never known in anyone else. And she loves me, far more than I deserve. I know she would never contemplate betraying me; her loyalty and fidelity are absolute. How can I have risked all of this for what amounts to no more than a glorified roll in the hay?
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I tell my wife, meaning it.
Later that night, after Mal and I have made love for the first time since I slept with Sara—not the roller-coaster of eroticism that it is with Sara, granted, but laced with a love and gentleness I can only ever find with my wife—we make plans for a romantic break in Cornwall, where we honeymooned; we build castles in the air and articulate our dreams for our children, for ourselves. I fall asleep with my head in the curve of her arm, and promise from the depths of my soul that it will all be different from now on.
For four days, Sara manages to avoid being alone with me for a single moment with the same expertise with which I once evaded her.
She whisks in and out of my office with armfuls of files, careful to make sure that Emma is within earshot before doing so. Christ knows how her bladder is holding up; I’ve stationed myself outside the women’s toilet for hours without glimpsing her. Much as I’d be happy to play ostrich with her, I know we can’t bury our heads in the sand forever; I need to end this liaison cleanly, and with as little acrimony as possible. I have to explain, for my own peace of mind; and to somehow find the right moment to discuss a very good job opening at Falkners Penn for a young, ambitious lawyer keen to make partner before she’s thirty.
I have to be certain she’s not going to betray me.
My chance comes on Friday, when Emma’s sister unexpectedly arrives from Worcester, and she begs for an unscheduled afternoon off.
Joan and David are out of the office; a secretarial leaving party has decimated the remainder of the staff. I give the one temp on duty a free pass, and she scuttles off, delighted, to join her colleagues across the road.
Sara looks startled as I walk into the conference room, and instantly leaps up from the table. “I just have to get this FDR statement to Emma—”
“She’s not here. She’s taken the afternoon off to go shopping with her sister.”
“Perhaps one of the other girls—”
“They’re all at Milagro’s for Jenny’s leaving party. Sara,” I put out a hand to detain her, “I need to explain.”
She stiffens.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“I know this must be hard to believe, but I had no idea she was going to turn up until she appeared in my office. I swear it. I wouldn’t do that to you; you must know that. I didn’t have a chance to phone you; she was with me the whole time, and then she insisted on Yuzo’s—Christ, what are the odds—”
“Quite high, I should imagine, when you declare your preference to the world in The Lawyer,” Sara says acidly.
“But I really had no idea she—”
“Nicholas, please. I think we both know the situation. You’re a married man; I knew that from the beginning. There’s really no need to rake things over anymore. We had a good time, but we knew all along it had to end sooner or later. At least this way no one’s got hurt.”
Her eyes are suspiciously bright. I brush my thumbs beneath them. “Haven’t they?”
I sought her out with the most honest of intentions. I truly meant for this to be a tying up of loose ends.
But that touch is all it takes. A fire ignites between us; my cock is rock hard in an instant, and as Sara’s eyelids flutter, I smell her arousal. Gripping her face between my palms, I bruise her lips beneath mine. I taste the metallic tang of blood and don’t know which of us is cut.
She yanks my shirt out of my trousers as I propel her backward toward the glossy mahogany conference table and shove her skirt up over her thighs. She fumbles with my belt buckle. Buttons plink across the table as I rip open her shirt. I push aside her panties with fierce fingers. In a moment I’m inside her, forcing her down onto the surface of the table, frantic and angry and hot with desire. My mouth descends on one cinnamon nipple, biting it roughly through the flimsy fabric of her bra. There’s a crash as her heap of files tumbles from the table to the floor.
Her legs curl around my waist, and I drive my cock deeper into her. She pulls my shirt free from my shoulders as I unhook her bra; our skin hisses as it hits. She smells of vanilla and sweat and peppermint and sex. Her ripe breasts splay lushly either side of her breastbone, eddying with every violent thrust. Throwing back her head, a guttural growl vibrates low in her throat, her sharp white teeth biting down on her swollen lower lip. Her nails dig deep into my shoulder blades and I flinch don’t leave marks and then oh God oh God oh God—
She comes a moment later, her body jerking so hard that her spine thumps against the table. I feel her juices flood us both and it’s almost enough to get me hard again.
“Oh, Christ, I’ve peed myself—”
“No. You just came. You know. Ejaculated.”
She laughs disbelievingly. “Fuck off.”
I pull out of her and yank up my trousers. “You’ve done it before. Not many women do it, but those that can—Jesus. You have no idea how erotic it is.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Would I joke about something like that?”
“You tell me.” She sits up on the table and pulls down her skirt. “Shit, you’ve ripped half the buttons off my blouse. You couldn’t have just waited a moment and undone them, could you?”
“Could you?”
Her expression is dark and hot. “No.”
“It’s not over, is it?” I whisper, cupping her breast in my hand and pulling her buttocks toward me with the other. “Between us.”
Her nipple stiffens instantly. My cock is already halfway to being ready for her once more. I drop to my knees and spread her legs as she sits on the edge of the table, burying my face in her wet pussy.
“We haven’t even started,” she groans.
My mother had a saying: No one misses a slice of cut cake. She meant that the first cut is the one you notice. After that, the difference is much harder to see.
The first night I slept with Sara, I was tormented with guilt. Each subsequent liaison has compounded the betrayal; but somehow, where once guilt blistered my skin and rubbed my soul raw, now it merely chafes like an ill-fitting shoe.
If I’m h
onest: All I care about now is not getting caught.
“You can’t mark me again,” I whisper, stroking Sara’s bare shoulder as we lie in the darkness of her bedroom, both of us spent. I can’t afford Claridge’s on a long-term basis; we have no choice now but to use her flat, whatever the risk. “After the conference room, I had to get up half an hour earlier for a week so that I could finish showering before Mal was awake.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“I know. But we have to be careful—”
“Enough, already,” Sara says tightly. She leans over me to pick up her cigarettes from the bedside table. “What do you want me to do, wear surgical gloves?”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that. Smoke. It’s not like you smoke the rest of the time; I hate that you do it in bed.”
“So let’s stick to having sex in the great outdoors.”
“Now you sound like a petulant child.”
“So stop talking to me like one!”
She swings her legs out of bed and stalks naked toward the window, parting the blinds with one finger and exhaling moodily. “I’m fed up with being fitted in between lunch and conference with Counsel. It’s like you get here, we have sex, and then you leave. It’s not exactly romantic, is it?”
“We have dinner—we went to the opera—”
“Fucking Wagner!”
“I thought you liked Wagner. Tristan und Isolde was your idea—”
She drops her cigarette into a revolting mug half full of cold coffee and sits back down on the bed beside me, her expression instantly contrite. “I do, Nick. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a pain in the arse. I just like being with you, that’s all. I hate that it has to be like this—”
“How else do you expect it to be, Sara?”
“I’m not asking for anything,” she answers quickly. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I stay here as late as I can,” I say tiredly. “I missed the last train from Waterloo last week; I had to get a taxi from London all the way to bloody Wiltshire; do you have any idea how much that cost? I’m sorry that I can’t stay here more often, and I’m sorry that I can’t stay all night; but you knew it was going to be like this.”
She gives a light half-laugh that doesn’t quite come off. “You could call me a bit more often at the weekend.”
“It’s not that easy. I can’t call you from the home phone; it’s too risky. Mal could overhear me, or the children could pick up the extension.” I throw a pillow behind my head. “And my mobile doesn’t pick up any reception at home, we’re in a network-dead zone. I have to drive halfway to Salisbury to use it, and there’s a limited number of excuses I can come up with to do that. I’m sorry.”
“Nick, I know the score. I’m not asking for any kind of commitment, you know that.” She averts her gaze. “I’d just like to wake up with you once in a while, have breakfast, read the newspapers, that kind of thing.”
No, I want to tell her, those are the kinds of things you do with your wife, and I already have one of those.
I watch her picking fretfully at a loose thread in the sheet with a mixture of pity and exasperation. She’s in too deep. She is starting to have feelings for me, whatever she may say now; and I am going to end up hurting her. I have to end it. I have to end it.
But carefully. I can’t risk her running to Mal afterward. Perhaps if I take her away, explain it all, let her down gently.
“Look,” I say, “Mal mentioned something about a trip to Italy around Easter—some sort of sourcing trip for her new restaurant; I didn’t pay much attention. She’ll be away for a few days; the girls will be with her mother. I might be able to arrange something then.”
Her naked left breast is an inviting two inches away from my shoulder. Jesus. My cock stirs, and I reach for her; but she pulls away from me, chewing her lip and looking down at her nails. “Nick?”
Christ, what now?
“Nick, do you and Mal—do you still, you know?”
“Do we still what?”
“God, do I have to spell it out?” She flushes. “Do you still have sex?”
There’s no right way to answer this question. I’m married, I want to tell her; of course I still have sex with my wife. Not as often as we did once—our bedroom could not be mistaken for a French brothel—but yes, we have sex, and yes, it’s very nice, thank you, sometimes quite a bit more than nice. And it’s very different from sex with you, which is to nice what interstellar travel is to a trip to Bournemouth; but I’m a man, which means that sometimes I’m in the mood for a trip to Bournemouth, and sometimes I want to don a spacesuit.
But this isn’t what Sara wants to hear. And I want to keep Sara happy—for her sake, because I truly like and respect her, I don’t want to hurt her—and for my own.
“She’s not really that interested in sex anymore,” I say, flinching inwardly at this new betrayal. “What with the children and everything, she’s never really in the mood. And since I met you,” and this time Sara doesn’t move away when I reach for her, “ I haven’t been in the mood, either.”
She slides astride me, satisfied now. “Really?” she says, easing me inside her. “I can’t say that’s a problem I’ve ever noticed.”
Three weeks later, I pad barefoot down the narrow stairs of our rented cottage in Rock and find Mal already busy in the kitchen. Something rather foul-smelling is cooking on the stove. I lean over to peer into the frying pan and do a double take.
There, being skillfully sautéed to a crisp, is one of my black wool socks.
“Mal, what on earth are you doing?”
“What you asked me to do last night,” she says, flipping it expertly with a fish-slice, “when you came to bed very drunk.”
“I don’t remember asking you to cook my sock.”
She grins wickedly at me, her dark eyes dancing, and the penny drops. “Oh, very funny,” I say, grabbing my burnt sock out of the pan and blowing on my fingers. “How long have you been waiting to set me up with that witty little play on words?”
“Since about eight this morning.” Mal giggles.
Sometimes my wife seems little older than the children. It’s at moments like this I realize from whence Evie has acquired her unorthodox sense of humor and attitude to life.
I arranged this long weekend because I’d promised it to Mal; I packed for it with a heavy heart and deep sense of misgiving. Four days together at close quarters, without the distractions of children and work, lacking even the diversion of household chores or television to dilute our unaccustomed intimacy. A delightful scenario for newlyweds; a testing one for even the most devoted long-standing marriages. How much more so for a husband in the midst of an adulterous affair?
I expected it to be awkward—difficult, even, with long silences and stilted conversation. I thought the distance between us would be painfully obvious to us both.
What I did not expect was to fall back in love with my wife.
I stayed up into the small hours last night, trying to make sense of the chaos in my heart and head. Intoxicated as I am with Sara, I am not such a fool as to mistake my feelings for love, or anywhere close. The nature of my betrayal is entirely sexual; there is no question of any emotional involvement. I’m not sure whether that makes it better or worse.
Sex with Mal is pleasant. Tender, in a way it never is with Sara. But with Sara, it’s like nothing I’ve ever known. I can ask for anything, be anyone I want. There’s no fear of being judged, of being thought dirty, or perverted, or selfish. She won’t look at me as I slice the tops off the girls’ boiled eggs at breakfast and remember what I did to her the night before. To have to turn my back on that sexual freedom forever, to give her up; it’d be like waking up blind and knowing you’ll never see a sunrise again.
When Mal goes away, I remind myself. I have to tell Sara it’s over then. If I don’t, sooner or later, Mal is going to find out, and I will lose her. And I love Mal: more than I crave Sara. It should be easy.
&n
bsp; It won’t be, of course.
I wrap my arms around my wife and kiss the top of her head. “Mea culpa. I guess I got through rather more of the malt than I’d realized after you went to bed—”
“My own fault for not staying awake and supervising you. But it’s not like the ending to Casablanca is ever going to change, and I was so tired after yesterday—”
She blushes, and I can’t help but smile. My wife of ten years, the mother of my three children, reduced to flushing like a teenager when she’s reminded of our agreeable afternoon in bed. “I meant the climb down to the cove, Nicholas.”
“Ah. Fancy doing it all again today?”
“We don’t want to keep going down the same old paths, do we, Nicholas; that would get rather dull, wouldn’t it?”
“Would it?”
“It would.” She pulls a freshly baked pie out of the oven—even on holiday, my wife the cook—and bats my hand away. “Wait. A little anticipation will do you the world of good. This is for lunch. I thought an alfresco picnic would be fun, and the weather is supposed to be rather nice, later, for March; we can wrap up warm and sit on the beach—”
“Alfresco works for me.”
She giggles again. “Nicholas—”
My mobile telephone shrills. It’s on the windowsill beside Mal; she reaches for it, but in a moment that lasts a lifetime I just manage to get there first. “It might be a client,” I say quickly. “I had to give Mrs. Wasserstein my number; it was the only way to get Friday and Monday off.”
Mal looks surprised. “Don’t do that too often or you’ll never get a break.” She covers the pie with a linen tea towel. “I need to get my tennis shoes out of the car boot if we’re going to go for a walk—have you seen the keys?”
“In my jacket pocket, on the banister.”
I take the phone out into the back garden, shivering in my dressing gown and bare feet. “Sara, what the hell are you doing calling me at home?”
She sounds stricken. “Oh, God, Nick, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to call you; I must’ve hit redial by mistake. Jesus, I hope I didn’t cause a problem—I’m really sorry.”